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April Rassa

AMA: HackerOne Former Vice President of Product Marketing, April Rassa on Influencing the Product Roadmap

April 2, 2020 @ 10:00AM PT

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April Rassa

Vice President Product Marketing · Celigo

👋 Hi all, my name is April Rassa, I'm based in the Bay Area (northern California)

💼 I lead Solutions Marketing at Clari and advise companies on GTM strategies

👀 Key topics top of mind is how best to using AI in our field (best practices), pricing and packaging shifts, and how best to influence the product roadmap.

🤝 Topics that you can help others with: I'm pretty open to any topic topi of mind. Hit me up, if I don't know how to help, I'll let you know! :)

🍦 Favorite ice cream flavor: Pistachio

  1. What are the aspects of operationalizing a Go-To-Market plan that might prove to be most risky?

    April Rassa
    April Rassa

    Celigo Vice President Product Marketing | Formerly HackerOne, Cohere, Box, Google, Adobe • 6y

    There are probably three major questions to answer when operationalizing a GTM plan: What is the governance? Meaning who is in charge? What is the division of labor? Who holds what decision rights (e.g., decide, influence, escalate)? When do you scale? There are two broad options: launch-and-learn or test-and-scale. In a launch-and-learn model, scaling happens first as the commercialization comes online across the enterprise at once. Learning then occurs after rollout and across the enterprise. ...Read More

    2,545 Views
    2 requests

  2. How do product marketers lead a product launch when roadmaps and priorities are constantly changing?

    There is a lack of alignment at my company and our teams act in silos. Consequently, my roadmap and goals seem to change on a weekly if not bi-weekly basis because marketing keeps getting pulled in different directions. There needs to be some sort of roadmap and role that aligns sales with product, but I'm not sure if that should come from product marketing or not. I want to initiate this conversation, but I don't know if it's overstepping my role or not. Advice here?

    April Rassa
    April Rassa

    Celigo Vice President Product Marketing | Formerly HackerOne, Cohere, Box, Google, Adobe • 6y

    As the CMO of the product, product marketing should take the lead and make sure the teams are aligned. This may require you to set up a meeting with Product Management (and perhaps other leaders across the busienss) to discuss the shifting priorities and align on a path forward. Map out the impact on the business, clearly articulate the challenges and come into the meeting with proposed alternatives and suggestions to spur the conversation.

    829 Views
    2 requests

  3. How do you deliver sales feedback to the product team to inform the current roadmap and make changes?

    April Rassa
    April Rassa

    Celigo Vice President Product Marketing | Formerly HackerOne, Cohere, Box, Google, Adobe • 6y

    I'm fairly new to HackerOne but I can tell you how I've done it before and its worked. We've had a customer insights meeting with the sales leadership team, we review the deals and discuss opps that were won, lost, etc. In these meetings we discuss product gaps, feedback, etc. PMMs also set up time with Sales engineers and Customer Success teams to gain feedback (cadence varies by typically on a monthly basis). We would then have a master doc that we would share and meet with Product to discuss.

    875 Views
    1 request

  4. How does the product marketing team's placement in the org chart (under marketing, product, etc.) effect your ability to influence the roadmap?

    April Rassa
    April Rassa

    Celigo Vice President Product Marketing | Formerly HackerOne, Cohere, Box, Google, Adobe • 6y

    The PMM team at my previous employer, HackerOne reported to Marketing. PM's purpose in the universe is to build the right product by translating customer needs into products they can't live without. PMMs role is to translate these products into value propositions that move customers to action and help influence the product roadmap. 

    892 Views
    1 request

  5. How do you influence product roadmap as a product marketer.

    This is an interview question we get all the time

    April Rassa
    April Rassa

    Celigo Vice President Product Marketing | Formerly HackerOne, Cohere, Box, Google, Adobe • 6y

    Captain obvious here but customers and data. Framing stories and pain points mapped to personas helps, partnering with your Product team so you're locked in the customer journey is also super helpful, so the teams recognize where the shifts muct be made. Customer retention is the holy grail of business, and don’t you ever forget it! Without customers, you don’t have a product or business, so if you want to keep them (happy), it’s in your best interest to serve their needs. Your customers should ...Read More

    2,133 Views
    2 requests

  6. What role should a customer advisory board have in influencing your product roadmap, and why?

    Product marketing owns the customer advisory board but product management owns the roadmap.

    April Rassa
    April Rassa

    Celigo Vice President Product Marketing | Formerly HackerOne, Cohere, Box, Google, Adobe • 6y

    CABs are great. Customer advisory boards have several common objectives in mind, including:- To create champions for the brand- To validate product ideas and guide the product roadmap- To help shape marketing messaging- To gather market intelligence - Understand the buying triggers of the company’s market- Provide beta users for the company’s new products- Help the company identify new markets A customer advisory board can provide insights into how customers are actually using your products, wha ...Read More

    2,133 Views
    1 request

  7. What type of marketing activities should be considered in parallel while products are in development?

    April Rassa
    April Rassa

    Celigo Vice President Product Marketing | Formerly HackerOne, Cohere, Box, Google, Adobe • 6y

    When a product is in development you typically will be working on a launch plan in parallel.

    These elements include:

    - GTM strategy: product adoption strategy, pricing/packaging, competitive, customer playbook

    - Internal enablement & comms strategy

    - Sales enablement/technical enablement (product docs, training)

    - External comms and planning (PR, analyst briefings, customer comms, customer testimonials, etc)

    - Demand gen plan

    1,964 Views
    2 requests

  8. What are tips for maintaining open lines of communication amongst other product and marketing priorities?

    April Rassa
    April Rassa

    Celigo Vice President Product Marketing | Formerly HackerOne, Cohere, Box, Google, Adobe • 6y

    At HackerOne we have open lines of communications across teams, everyone has visibility into each department's OKRs and we have a weekly company-wide AMAs where anyone can ask anything about the business to any employee. The AMAs are also structured with a weekly agenda outlining 2-4 topics that will be presented. We implement bi-weekly meetings with functional teams so everyone is clear on priorities. We've also implemented "squad meetings" where in a given time there are key stakeholders repon ...Read More

    1,599 Views
    1 request

  9. How do you hold the product team accountable for delivering on the product roadmap?

    April Rassa
    April Rassa

    Celigo Vice President Product Marketing | Formerly HackerOne, Cohere, Box, Google, Adobe • 6y

    Build strong relationships with your product team. The product plan presents strategic goals and initiatives spanning a long timeframe. The release plan tracks specific phases of work that lead to the deployment of functionality or a major launch. This is usually much shorter than the product plan, depending on the company’s release cycle. It is often 30, 60, or 90 days. So, having regular meetings with your Product lead will give you visibility on how the team is tracking and then sharing the a ...Read More

    1,590 Views
    1 request

  10. Can you share advice for the first product marketer at a company for influencing the product roadmap?

    April Rassa
    April Rassa

    Celigo Vice President Product Marketing | Formerly HackerOne, Cohere, Box, Google, Adobe • 6y

    Sure, as the first product marketer, you need to arm yourself with customer insights (be the voice of the customer), be able to clearly define who you're selling to, what is their role, how do they make decisions, what are their pain points, how is your company uniquely addressing those key areas, what does the competitive ecosystem look like, how do they price, what's the win/loss ratio? Do you have data and information on lost customers? What's the plan to acquire net new customers? These can ...Read More

    1,571 Views
    1 request

  11. How do you manage and inform the futuristic vision of the product roadmap with current customer requirements / feedback?

    April Rassa
    April Rassa

    Celigo Vice President Product Marketing | Formerly HackerOne, Cohere, Box, Google, Adobe • 6y

    Great question. Oftentimes customers’ requests for added capabilities or improvements to current features are already in your product roadmap. When customer feedback corresponds with your product plan, use the volume of requests for a certain feature to prioritize stack and rank, perhaps bumping one feature up and another one down as you plan upcoming releases.As your company grows and you receive increasingly more feedback from your customers, it can be difficult to decide what’s really worth i ...Read More

    1,560 Views
    2 requests

  12. As a product marketer, how do you manage product teams that are poor at scoping releases? Especially as they apply to changing release dates and minor updates.

    April Rassa
    April Rassa

    Celigo Vice President Product Marketing | Formerly HackerOne, Cohere, Box, Google, Adobe • 6y

    As a product marketer, you don't manage scoping releases. Product managers need to be accountable for managing release dates and minor updates. If those dates are slipping, you need to set a meeting in place to better understand the gaps and the implications. There is a communication and sales element that will be impacted if this pattern continues so getting ahead of it quicker is advised.

    809 Views
    2 requests

  13. As a product marketer, how do you prioritize the features that you are requesting in the roadmap?

    April Rassa
    April Rassa

    Celigo Vice President Product Marketing | Formerly HackerOne, Cohere, Box, Google, Adobe • 6y

    To be clear, Product marketing doesn't priortize feature on a roadmap, you enable Product with the data and business case to prioritize features. Arm the teams with the data and insights needed to drive your case. Can you pull in product usage data, sales pipeline and revenue impacts, support tickets and NPS data, user testing feedback, etc. If you have these elements, then you can provide a rationale for why certain features are ranked in the order they are to drive the discussion with Product.

    1,508 Views
    1 request

  14. How do you get product management to buy into focusing the roadmap on a specific customer segment?

    April Rassa
    April Rassa

    Celigo Vice President Product Marketing | Formerly HackerOne, Cohere, Box, Google, Adobe • 6y

    You need to understand which customer segments you will tackle first and in what order. Not only will this exercise help define your Go To Market strategy but it also will greatly impact your MVP. I like to think of this incremental Go To Market strategy as a customer acquisition roadmap. A product roadmap needs to align with a customer acquisition roadmap.   So, you need to identify who your innovators and early adopters are and the customer personas/segments that fit within them in order to op ...Read More

    1,368 Views
    1 request